Breed
by allan
Summary: Shadow of the past, promise of a future. (follow-up to 'Red Tide')


Allan Lowson                                   Disposable CopyPRIVATE 

P.O.Box 471,                     Not a Simultaneous Submission

Point Roberts,                               About 3,850 Words

WA 98281, USA.

(604)946-2427.

**                NIGHT BREEDS**

     Lady Day is on the turntable, but it is night now and her 

song is done.  The needle slips into the groove; in and out, in and out.  The needle in my arm finds the rhythm of blood as I tap the works.  Waves of false post-coital warmth spread like an old lover's embrace... and I drift.

     "I gotta a man, crazy for me

     He's funny, that way."

     That's what she sang, but he's not funny.  Real crazy never is.

     The worn-out turntable clicks in, finally lifting the stylus only to drop it again.  We're both stuck on replay.  My needle slips from comfortably numb fingers to the dirty rug.  Let it--ain't like I got no more.  Ruby only gave me enough skag to get hooked again, she's funny that way.  She wants to suck me back to her bed, to muscle the bad tricks and cater to her 'special' customers.  She wants her pet pussy back.

     Big fat Ruby, yer as bad as the Johns--worse, they're only men.  Men; weak, worthless, following their pricks around like down-wind dogs.  They want mommy, they want discipline; they want, they want.  What do they care about what I want, what I need?  I don't need the junk or the booze and they know where they can stick the cheap sex.

     Bast rubs against my leg, for once her bluepoint yowl isn't for food; she feels it too.  The tide tonight is swollen with longing for the harvest moon; so big, so far.  Bast should be on the tiles dueting with her Tom.  It's not just the poppy-juice holding me from letting her out--I'm jealous.

     My Tom is out there too.  His song is screams and pleadings, the crunch of bone, the splash of blood.  It was my song, but I'm too temperamental and don't have his control.  Sometimes when my whip sings, men sleep deep.  He knows who I am, what I am, and why I'm here all fucked-up.  All I know is that he's mine.  All that I want and I can't have him.

     The glass rattles against my teeth and I can barely feel the gin going down.  I'll have to call the Dial-a Bottle later; can't go out tonight, not on a full moon.  I'm their preferred customer lately, the weird lush that tips good just don't fuck with her.  A new delivery guy wanted a kiss first; I guess my wrap wasn't too tight.  I bit the neck off the bottle.  Kiss this, kid.

     There is a mirror set in the open closet door.  I don't like what it tells me, so I hang my 'evening wear' over the mocking reflection.  The suit is the real me anyhow; all hooked-up and empty.  A cast skin of black velvet over leather.  Tonight I am not the Cat, just another high-yella whore fulla booze 'n blues, washed-up in a one lightbulb flophouse room.

     My Tom won't hang up his second skin, not him.  He won't come over to my side of the tracks, won't walk on the wild side.       "You even let me cut you, deep enough to kill most men.  It was easier for you than being one.  Know what, man?  You're queer for Justice."  So I talk to myself and pretend you're here.  That you gonna give what I need.

     Why couldn't I have lived back when Billie was singing the blues.   There were real men left then: Leadbelly, Jack Johnson, and the one who made me shiver where good little girls weren't meant to... the Shadow.  I'd listen to Orson Welles on the radio and imagine I was Margot, never thinking I'd grow up to taste the bitter fruit.

     "Southern trees bear a strange fruit

     Blood on the leaves, and blood at the root"

     The record is scratched from my fumblings.  I always play it when I'm like this, play it and play it.  If I don't drink, I'll suit-up and hunt down vermin.  A molester, maybe a tasty rapist, anybody.  The more I kill, the more you despise me.  

     "You bastard, why didn't you kill me?  I want to feel those hands overpower me again.  C'mon big boy; do it, just do it.  I'm black, you're white.  You're good and I'm so very bad.  What's wrong with you?

     "C'mon please, be a man.  Be my Tom."

     "Come on, come on damn you!  Breathe."  Blow; two, three, four--pump, pump.  "Come on, don't you die on me, the ambulance is almost here."

     I strip the ampoule from my utility belt and drive its point directly into his heart muscle.  The sirens are closing fast.  "Live, damn you!"

     There, a flutter in his jugular, a gasp trembles on torn, blue lips.  "Thank you," I whisper to the night.  I don't deserve favours.

     From the shadow of a roof ventilator I observe, wrapped in my cape.  The para-meds take over with oxygen, officers pick up broken weapons and teeth.  Only Gordon looks up, he knows and shakes his head sadly.  I can almost read his lips.

     "Lucky, this time.  Lucky."  He doesn't just mean the shattered ninja, we all got lucky tonight.  Poor old James, he'll be chain-smoking again at this rate.  His is the last death I want on my conscience.

     This latest assassin was their best to date; very skilled, very professional.  Excellent sword technique and a spring derringer should blade or fists fail.  He was in his prime; fast, handsome, deadly... was.  He only made two mistakes that mattered.  The first was accepting the hit, the second was calling me a 'cat-fucker'.  Last words deserve more serious consideration.  He won't be communicating again until he regains the use of his fingers; the larynx makes a unique crunching sound, hear it across a room.  People forget how clear, how clean is the call of breaking bones.  Our deepest animal senses are keyed to carnivore noises.  I could listen to them all night long.

     My hands still twitch for more.  I've got to get a grip, yet the urge squeezes back even stronger.  It feels like I'm going rogue.  Christ! I hate them all: soft, corrupt, petty.  I have been a diligent shepherd, but I'm growing very tired of these sheep.  Even the wolves are boring me.

     I'm forty and stuck in a rut, if I don't pull myself together it will steer me straight to Arkham.  I can hear the shrinks now:  mid-life crisis, punchy, split personality, bi-polars always protect the mania.  Sure we do, it's where we live, dummy.  If it ever comes down to Bruce, or the Bat--I'm with the Bat.

     Across town a rutting cat keens to the waxed moon.  My rut?  A bitter laugh is forced from my lips.  It echoes for too long.

     "Ha, ha, ha, ha... "

     I spin around--nothing!  Moon-etched shadows, silent and deep as the one that conceals me.  I slip on the night-sonics from out their back clip, but no-one is there.  Now I'm imagining things; my funny man is safe in his rubber room with the rest of the pack.  Besides, that wasn't a crazy laugh, just cruel.  Maybe it really was mine--I'd better get used to it.

     A hesitant knock at my door.  I heard his shuffling feet finally reach the landing, the painful pause at the top of the stairs.  Asthmatic breath at my door, heart like a trip-hammer.

     "Aren't you a bit old for this?" I ask as I pay him for the bottle, regretting it immediately.  He really is too old; thin, bowed, helpless--can't even get his breath to reply.  I don't like the colour of his lips and I sure don't need no emergency team poking around.

     "Look, pops.  I think you'd better come in and sit down.  Just don't get any funny ideas, okay?"

     That gets a hoarse cackle.  "Heh, heh.  My funny ideas died with Marg, God bless her."

     I open the fresh bottle and pour him a shot too.  Makes a change from drinking alone and he sure looks like he could use one.  Hah!  Drinking away the small hours with a strange man in my room, and no funny business.  There's a first time for everything.

     Damn, my cat suit is still on the closet door and the whip's hanging there too.  Fortunately his rheumy eyes don't seem to notice, he's looking down into the glass.

     "It's been a long time since I tasted liquor," he says very quietly.  "It brings back old ghosts."

     Old ghost himself.  I don't need any old ghosts; still, I go over anyhow and flip the record to hear Billie's voice haunting me from the grave.  It gives an excuse to pass the closet door and shut it. I go over to the open window.

     "Is it too cold for you?"  I ask, checking his reflection in the panes, but he's only looking at the record sleeve.

     "No, I savour the night.  Its music compliments your taste in blues."

     A cat cries from another tenement roof, and Bast doesn't spring to the sill to call back.  Unusual for her to sit so politely with a strange male on her turf.

     "After all," he whispers, "night is the realm of our passions."

     I turn at the sudden strangeness in his voice.  They must be watering the booze, suddenly I don't feel drunk.

     He's still quietly sitting there, yet somehow it isn't him anymore.  I feel my hackles rise and Bast slinks to my side--it's not like her to fear any man.

     "Hey, I told you.  Talk funny and you're outta here."  What's wrong with men?  Never too old, always too weak.  "What kinda woman you take me for anyhow?"

     Thin lips peel back from unsettlingly long teeth and his laugh is a cemetery wind.  

     "Ha, ha, ha, ha..."  He leans back into the shadows of my worn-out wing chair; all I see is teeth and those ice-grey eyes.  Like two holes in the wall and strange neighbours.

     "I take you for a cat, Selina," he whispers.

     No, it can't be him.  Joker's strapped down in Arkham.  Besides, I'd know his smell anywhere and even he doesn't laugh like that.

     A step to the closet and the whip is in my hand--nothing faster than my whip.  I turn like lightning, but he isn't in the chair now.  He's over by the window, his profile against the moonlight like a gargoyle on Gotham Towers.

     "Pray put on the rest, Ms. Kyle, I shall look away.  This is a formal visit."

     I catch myself in the mirror, half-way into my leathers, wondering why I'm obeying him.  I adjust the mask, nails snick out and my tail twitches impatiently.  Whoever this weirdo is, he's a fool to coax me from the closet.  It's a long way down to the alley for an old man and nobody in this building will ever notice anything concerning this apartment.

     Claws flip back the door.  Shit!  Two automatics, one I could handle easy.  He spins them back beneath his ancient overcoat in a blur of practiced ease.  "Your pardon, getting into character is most infectious even though I could never quite accept the modern fascination with elaborate costumes."

     His battered felt has straightened out into a wide brim fedora, shoulders have unstooped and he's discarded the raveled woolen gloves.  My eyes are still on his gun hands; so fast, so precise.  A ring glowed there; very large, very valuable.  He may still fall out my window, but he won't be wearing that--like Mae West, jewels are my hobby.  I can't take my eyes off it...

     "Do not gaze on the ring." The command in his voice snaps back my concentration.  "You are not ready for its will."  He passes his other hand over the opal and red fire retreats into the depths.  It looks like blood trying to seep out between his fingers.

     I shake myself and get a grip.  What did that bitch Ruby put in the last bindle?  Claws digging into my palm tells me I'm not dreaming, pain tells me to act.  "Mrroow!"

     My whip sings out like a scorpion's tail.  He flicks it aside as if it were a gnat.

     "No more foolishness, please.  I am too old to waste time with mere physicality."

     I recoil the whip and its clawed tip is gone.  "How the hell did...?"  

     An impatient wave dismisses the question.  "A half-century of practice.  Combat is the first skill and the least important.  You shall learn to listen.  Now."

     For the second time tonight I find myself directed by his will, third if I count inviting him in.  

     So I listen very carefully indeed.  Only a cat's yowl, the distant open-pipe blare of a late partying biker, sounds of the night shift wafting faint from the docks.

     "Reject what you think you hear and listen like a cat."  His voice slides into my thoughts.  

     What does he want?  I control my breathing, and really listen.  The snorer next door, an insomniac's TV jabbering somewhere in the building.  Out there humanity is asleep, defenseless, trusting in numbers.  We of the dark are different, rogue solitaries.  Good, bad, and all quite mad.  Somewhere tonight one of you is meeting one of us.  Screams go unnoticed in deep city, to predator ears, it is a song.

     "Yes," he says.  "The song, only hear the song."

     The song of the night that calls so strong when the moon is gravid.  I've listened too long with that dark singer not to hear woman-blues on the wind.

     "I need to know the heart of the matter," he whispers, slinking his tongue around in my head.  "Before I confront your... ah, significant other."

     So that's it, anger brings me back to myself.  It's always the Bat they really want; the sickos, the press, Gordon.  It bursts out.  "What about me?  I'm not saying I've been good, but I got feelings too."

     His eyes turn on me.  I've seen more emotion at the bottom of a fish freezer.  "Know the city hangs by your heartstrings, and more."  An arc is struck deep in those glacial eyes.  "I grow not young, and must perforce think of the morrow, the next generation.  The will that has brought you both together is from a race of super humans waiting to be born.  You are the chosen of creation."

     I feel that like a kick inside, the impatient kick of engaging moon-drive.  Children!  I hadn't dare hope for children.

     A whisper like a cold hand passing over my breasts.  "I will know your innermost secrets.  Now you may gaze on the girasol and lay open your heart."

     To look into his eyes is to be caught and ground between icebergs.  A sun rises, red as pulsing arterial blood.  His great ring burns in the heart of darkness--and I speak my heart.

     "My heart?  You think I got no heart, mister?  Even as a kid you had to show heart, and that went double for tomboys.  Nobody could follow me from fire escape to clothes line, from drainpipe to window ledge.  I saw a whole lotta things thru' windows that little girls ain't meant to know and I was a fast learner.  My hands got real fast too.

     "But even smart hearts bleed in deep city and everybody learn to sing the blues.  Nobody made me fool with the white stuff, turn tricks, muscle Johns.  Ain't none of it really cut my heart, not to the quick.

     "I was riding high in the headlines, high as my bank account.  I'd fought my way out of the street scene and even Big Ruby couldn't run me anymore.  I was too big to be anyone's pet.

     "Then I had to run up against him.  Can't beat him, can't have him... can't live without him.  We should be out stalking our prey; were-cat and vampire feasting on evil blood, mating on their corpses."   My claws stretch for one who isn't there and a howl escapes my lips.  "Ymrroouuwww."  

     Bast scuttles below the bed, she knows this song.  Yet my mysterious guest could be relaxing at the opera instead of in a panther's cage.  He seems lost in reverie; a long-toothed Tom contemplating the prowl, a connoisseur of darkness.

     "Ah Selina, you sing so strong, so pure, tonight.  Why, if I were a younger man...."  He sweeps off his fedora and moves into the moonlight.  I see his face and a darker face behind cast on the wall.  This man is capable of anything and I don't doubt his ability.  I realize he's what my man could become.  Utterly horrible, ultimately irresistible.

     "There was a woman once, as proud and fearless as yourself," he continues, his cold eyes boring into mine.  "We were the first of our kind; together we purged Gotham's mean streets then roved far beyond, perhaps too far.  We were so young then."  

     He bows his head, but not before I see emotion melting those ice-cube eyes.  "Inevitably, there was a child--a hard birth that broke my partner.  The boy proved healthy, perhaps too healthy for the thirst we share."  A sigh.  "My son is not entirely a success.  The breeding of Homo Novus seems an inexact science."

     He is speaking as if to himself, or rather the great fire-opal he turns on his marriage finger.  It seems to have a life of its own, a phoenix confined within an amber egg.  Its light reddens his features as if he looked into the fiery pit.  Never thought I'd lookin' at a demon. 

     I don't know what Ruby put into this shit, for sure it won't sell.  "Just who are you?" I demand, although what would be closer.

     His smile is a death-rictus.  "Shall we say I am a shadow of my former self?  A forgotten shade recalled to past haunts by your ardent summoning, that old song heard on the night wind."  Fingers fast enough to snatch the tip from a whip, form into a claw.  "I have held the testicles of the world in my palm, but you are a door for its true masters.  Even now, you feel destiny twitching your tail."  The fingers close like a vice.  "There is more to eugenics than ovens.  It is quite unnecessary to destroy, one merely creates a better species and evolution takes care of the rest.  Ask any Neanderthal."  

     He's completely compelling.  I... I can't argue.  He knows everything.

     And it really is him, the first and darkest knight of Gotham.  I thought he was dead, assuming he'd ever lived.  One of those urban apocrypha you hear about on the radio, or read about, or someone else's dad once bragged he saw.  But he was real, and close as all sin.

     "I just wanna know one thing.  Will he listen to you?"  I whisper.  Hope is a luxury I can't afford.

     My nightmare smiles and fondles the ring.  "He did once before in his extremity, he listened deeply indeed.  However, that was the orphaned boy.  The choice for him now is greater; father the ubermensch or fail in his destiny.  He must look on me well, and decide."

     My decision too. I look at him very closely.  

     I remember my first meeting with Y Lin; he's run the Triad and Tongs since at least the thirties.  Nobody crosses that ancient dragon-master twice.  In his oblique way he was telling me just how far a lone crazy-woman would be allowed to go.  Y Lin was permitting himself a chill mirth while narrating his version of the 'thousand cuts' transgressors might expect.  Suddenly, a peculiar shadow fell across the wall.  It was the silhouette that now sat framed in my window.

     "Ying Ko," he'd gasped.  Immediately drapes were torn aside and the room was filled with armed men; all of them messing their pants at the mere name.  Afterwards Y Lin passed it off as a show of instant readiness, yet for a brief unguarded moment I saw into his soul--and the terror there was more than mortal.  Now I understand there are powers older than Y Lin and they hunger not for blood, but what it carries.

     "What do you want from me?" I ask, half-fearing the answer.  His hands reach out into the night and encompass more than the city.  They reach for the very heavens.

     "I want an heir," he grates.  "One forged of will and passion who can take up the ring without becoming its slave."  

     He looks at me and it's like I have no clothes, like my flesh is a spread-open book.

     "Margot was too innocent, too sheltered from evil.  Roots of pain alone nourish the vintage."  He gestures out over Gotham.  "There is the soil, you have the root."

     I laugh, I can't help it--just keeps on coming up like vomit.  It's horrible; hysterics are meant to end with a slap or tears, not dry, racking sobs.

     "The root, the root?" I choke out.  "He's cut off at the root.  Listen to the laughter in Arkham, the whispers in the police bull-room."  My voice steadies and it doesn't even seem mine, it's as cold and dead as his.  "You're meant to know everything, aren't you?  Freak-face cut off his dick, reflex when Bat's gas tooth hit.  I know, I was there, I had to watch it all."

     His eyes betray no emotion although the mouth twitches unpleasantly.  "Oh yes, I know.  The soft tissue and nerve damage was irreversible, too necrotic for re-attachment.  It wasn't Alfred who attempted the surgery."  His steely fingers come together, but not in prayer.  "It is a time for sacrifice and there is a way to preserve the bloodline."  The ring seems to burn brighter, his steepled fingers like X-rayed bones.  "Like the Scoptics, I will teach self-sacrifice by example."  His smile is positively demoniac.  "Passing the torch is an old ritual.  I, however, can make it surgical."

     He swung himself out the window hours ago, still I wait and watch till dawn gilds the tips of Gotham Towers.  My throat is raw from laughter, even Bast has fled the sound.

     What a howl!  I didn't think it was possible to top the Joker's last act, but this is killing me.  Somehow I don't think Bats will appreciate the humour.  I can just see his face under the mask.  I start laughing again and it sound more like a death-rattle.

     No, Master Bruce will have a bloody fit; literally.  This improper suggestion could put him right over the top.  He'll know what the punch line would be in Arkham.  They'd never stop laughing at it in there and he'd never live it down.

     "Batman, him?  Couldn't fuck the cat if you gave him someone else's prick."

     No, the selfish prig won't go for it, of course.  Why did I fall for a guy who can't fuck or kill?  What kind of a man is that?

     Far away a cat keens for the milk-bowl moon.

     No fish tonight.  Not ever.


End file.
